Meg McLagan is a filmmaker and anthropologist.  Imagination and persistence in the face of social forces outside one’s control are frequent themes in her work.  She co-directed the feature documentary Lioness (2008) which won the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and aired nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens.   Following its release, Lioness played an important role in Congressional passage of the Women Veterans Healthcare bill, signed into law in 2010, and in Department of Defense’s 2013 decision to rescind the Direct Combat Exclusion Rule on women serving in previously restricted occupations.   Sony Television Pictures optioned the film for tv serialization.

She also co-directed Half Truths and Full Lies, a multi-channel installation that depicts, through documentation and reenactment, the case of a Latinx man who was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 at age fifteen for a murder he claims he did not commit. The project aims to transgress and complicate the tension between fabrication and record, guilt and innocence, and accident and intent, and in so doing, to make tangible the actual lives, stories, legal structures and statistics that underlie the current state of youth serving life without parole sentences in the U.S.

Other works include Air Drifts, a multimedia project on transboundary air pollution which explores how localized particulates drift beyond national air space and establish new zones of toxic responsibility, exhibited at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and produced with NASA and an interdisciplinary team of architects and scientists, and Tibet in Exile, a half hour film broadcast on public television and screened at festivals and museums in the U.S. and Europe.   McLagan began her film career working as a producer on Paris is Burning, one of the most acclaimed examples of 1990s New Queer Cinema.

McLagan's scholarly work examines the relationship between forms of politics and visual culture.   She has written on human rights, testimony and architectures of activism and is co-editor of Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, published by Zone Books in 2012.   Materials from her doctoral research on the  creation and growth of the "Tibet Movement" are housed in the newly inaugurated Meg McLagan Collection: The Tibet Movement in Exile, 1989-2003 in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University.

McLagan is a recipient of grants and fellowships from the Sundance Institute, MacDowell Colony, National Endowment for the Humanities, Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, Mellon Foundation, School of American Research, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Harriman Institute, among others.  She holds a doctorate in anthropology from New York University and B.A. in English from Yale.   She is Visiting Professor of Professional Practice in the Film Studies Program at Barnard College, Columbia University and affiliate faculty at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program, Columbia University.

megmclagan[at]gmail[dot]com
@megmclagan